“Listening is an essential element of storytelling and it is central to the media monitoring process”: Q/A with Bryan Council, President, Metro Monitor, Inc.

Bryan Council, President at Metro Monitor, Inc. shares in this post his view why media monitoring is a great source for storytelling, explains how media monitoring has evolved to media intelligence and shares his outlook for the next evolution while he reveals what kind of data or media we will be monitoring in the future.

Q:“The medium does not replace the message” (Theo Cooper). So why does media monitoring matter for storytelling?

Bryan: Media Monitoring is a great resource for helping organizations tell stories. At the most basic level, storytelling is about the transfer of information. Any organization that is interested in telling stories through traditional and social media should include a robust Media Monitoring service in their toolkit.

Media monitoring results can help create great content that can be used in an organization’s social media channels. Media monitoring results can also be used to identify and amplify stories that have taken place on traditional media outlets such as print, TV, and radio. Images, sound bites, and data captured via media monitoring are all great assets that can help with storytelling. A good media monitoring service can recognize industry trends and provide insights that can assist in identifying topics for the creation of meaningful stories.

Organizations also use media monitoring to help ensure that the stories they want to tell are being received by the audiences they would like to reach. Media Monitoring identifies where the stories are being told, who is telling them, and who is listening. Listening is an essential element of storytelling and it is central to the media monitoring process.

Q:How has media monitoring evolved to media intelligence and what evolution do you see coming in the next two years?

Bryan: Comprehensive media monitoring provides the foundation for creating useful media intelligence. The creation of media intelligence services has been in direct response to the needs of public relations and corporate communications professionals. The amount of media that needs to be monitored is ever expanding and clients are needing more efficient ways to locate the media mentions that matter the most to their brands.

The evolution from media monitoring to media intelligence has been aided by rapid advances in artificial intelligence technology. Specific technologies that have aided in the evolution of media intelligence include speech to text processing, image recognition, translation between languages, and sentiment analysis. The ability to leverage these technologies to find trends within large media databases is becoming a powerful media intelligence tool.

As the artificial intelligence technologies that are transforming media monitoring to media intelligence continue to evolve, there will still be a high value placed on human analysis of media monitoring results. We will see artificial intelligence play an increasing role in the creation of media intelligence. The types of artificial Intelligence that can be layered on top of media monitoring databases have already yielded important information. With that said, clients that need true media intelligence will continue to rely on a combination of automated and human created analysis.

In the next two years, we will see media intelligence evolve further into business intelligence. Business intelligence is created when media intelligence insights are combined with datasets that are behind company firewalls. At Metro Monitor, we work with our clients to provide media analysis services that match their unique needs. We also provide clients with the flexibility to export their media monitoring results so they can combine the data with their internal databases. We are in the early days of this transition, but companies will increasingly rely on these business intelligence insights to help them make strategic brand decisions.

Q:What kind of data or media that you do not have monitoring on today, can be interesting in the future?

Bryan: I continue to be interested in the artificial intelligence tools that now allow us to monitor content that was not able to be efficiently monitored in the past. One example of this is the monitoring of radio content. Thanks to the improvements in speech to text technology, we can now monitor more radio news content than ever before. We will continue to expand the amount of radio content that we monitor. Radio news content tends to be hyper local in nature and hyper local news monitoring is what we are finding is important to our clients. Podcasts are another source of media that we are interested in monitoring on behalf of our clients. The popularity of podcasts has exploded and the audiences for some of the more popular podcast programs are very large.

Other media content that will be interesting to monitor going forward are the images within social media posts and videos. We are also exploring the best methods for archiving and monitoring streaming video content that is only available online. There may also be some opportunities for monitoring the audio content produced by the people speaking at local civic and government meetings.

About Bryan Council, President, Metro Monitor, Inc.

Bryan Council has served as President of Metro Monitor for the past 16 years. Metro Monitor provides innovative TV, Radio, Online, and social media monitoring services to a diverse client base throughout the United States. Bryan has continued to evolve the product offerings of Metro Monitor to take advantage of the latest advances in technology. Under his leadership, the company has expanded broadcast media operations to 48 U.S. markets. Bryan has also overseen Metro Monitor’s acquisition of broadcast monitoring companies in the Tulsa, Miami, San Francisco, and Austin markets. He is a former president of the International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM) and has also served as president of News Data Service (NDS). Bryan also represents Metro Monitor as a member of FIBEP. Prior to joining Metro Monitor, Bryan held management positions at The Federal Reserve Bank and BlueCross BlueShield. You can reach Bryan via email, follow him on Twitter, or connect on LinkedIn.

About Metro Monitor

Founded in 1993 and operated by veteran media and public relations professionals, Metro Monitor provides professional news monitoring and news clipping services to a diverse client base. The company monitors all media sources and provides clients with custom media analysis services. The company services corporate communications and public relations professionals throughout the United States. To learn more you can visit www.metromonitor.com, follow them on Twitter, or learn more on LinkedIn.

About Sophia Karakeva

Sophia has a 16-year experience in the media monitoring and analysis industry, while she is currently a Vice President at FIBEP (world’s media intelligence federation), and Co-Chair of the AMEC European Chapter. Sophia is also member of the AMEC/FIBEP joint Content and Copyright Group. She holds a PhDr in Mass Communication and Journalism and speaks four languages. Sophia is a conceptual media thinker, communication believer, marketing digger and an@lysis enthusiast.